Evan Ramsey

I first started painting in elementary school and continued every year through high school. After stepping away for nearly ten years, I rediscovered my love for it in 2020 and have been fully committed ever since.

I’ve never been interested in making work that only asks to be looked at once. I want people to spend time with it and participate in what it becomes. Sometimes that happens through a place, an hour, or a shift in atmosphere. Other times it comes through a title, an unexpected detail, or a material that makes you want to touch something you know you probably shouldn’t.

Oil painting and textile let me approach that idea from opposite directions. The paintings create distance and nostalgia, asking the viewer to imagine a familiar setting at an unfamiliar hour. The textile work is physical and immediate, bringing the viewer closer before asking them to stop. The materials are different, but both depend on the tension between a first impression and what reveals itself afterward.

I’m based in Denver, Colorado, and currently developing The Twelfth Hour, a series of oil paintings organized around place and time, alongside Please No Touching?, a collection of sculptural textile works organized around material, texture, and form. I also make independent paintings, objects, commissions, and whatever else does not fit cleanly into one category.